In the last decade, a growing chorus of scholarly voices have raisedspecific issues of time, temporality, and temporal experience in AfricanAmerican literature. Paul Gilroy, Hortense Spillers, Jacqueline JonesRoyster, Lindon Barrett, Harry Elam, Saidiya Hartman, Michelle Wright,and others have put time near the center of African Diasporicexpressive, rhetorical, and political practices. As yet, reference totime is less common than familiar critical discourses of history andmemory, both of which offer ready resources for the study of blackexpression and agency. But time provides its own resources: how might webegin to isolate, explain, and understand them? This proposed sessionseeks papers that explore the "timely" aspects and arguments of AfricanDiasporic writing. What are the tropes, traditions, and topics thatblack writers have used in this work? How has black literatureinteracted with time in ways both concrete and abstract?

Possible topics for consideration:- Time consciousness and double consciousness- The "racial politics of temporality" (Gilroy, adapting Fabian,Osborne, et al)- Time as individual, intersubjective, and/or political experience inthe Diaspora- Pre-emancipation and/or post-emancipation temporality- Apocalypse, eschatology, renewal, or prophecy in African Diasporicspiritual literatures- Regionally specific conceptions of time and their literatures- Time in black musics- Diasporic responses to white (supremacist) conceptions of time- Discontinuity, newness, and innovation in the "changing same"- Timeless, cyclical, or originary temporalities: values and problems- Intersections among Western, American, & African (all broadlyconstrued) temporalities- Black literary/critical claims to and adaptations of chronotope,durée, time-lag, etc.- Haunting and other returns of the past, considered as specificallytemporal phenomena- Genre-specific constructions of time in black letters

Please send a 300-word abstract and a short CV by March 29, 2006. Emailsubmissions preferred; hard copy submissions accepted at the address below.